Man Made Machines

Kerry-Lee Powell In 1965, (the same year in which Paul Granjon was born) Nam June Paik remarked: ‘in the same way that the techniques of collage replaced oil-painting, the cathodic tube will replace canvas.’ Paik was being provocative here. While it is true that digital and electronic art is an increasingly important discipline, the notion that new technologies replace older techniques needs modifying. When they became affordable, video cameras and televisions were not simply a more modern method of producing images, they were also the first tools with which artists could explore and manipulate image and sound in real time, as well as address the politics of dissemination inherent to mass modes of transmission. By appropriating contemporary technologies, artists both contribute to and comment upon the ways in which such media operate upon the individual. When an artist chooses to use a camera instead of a paintbrush, it is not an innocent act. Granjon’s roots as an artist began in video and are thus grounded in the realm of digital and electronic technology. Technology is also now his subject. His series of short videos 2 Minutes of Experimentation and Entertainment (1996-1998) holds playful mirrors up to both technological innovation and the ways in which it is presented in the public domain. Both commentator and inventor, Granjon introduces in this series a set of humorous and impossible inventions: a hamburger duplicator that proposes to digitally analyse and reproduce cheeseburgers via a computer and microwave oven; shitBot (1997), a radio-driven vehicle that vaporises dog shit and an anti-gravitational vehicle for cats. Like science fiction, Granjon’s object is to exceed reality and he manipulates the fictive qualities of video to support this aim. Special effects and video editing create a veracity that is undermined by the spoof-like unreality of the machines. But the video series marks a transition in his work. While some machines rely on special effects others -such as the Cybernetic Parrot Sausage (1996)- are fully operational. What is interesting about these documentaries - that detail, almost pornographically, the inception and construction of his machines - is that an over-arching narrative of creation emerges. Video techniques and hilarious fictional machines give way to machines that now operate in real time, emerging from their half-life as movie props to become fully-functioning computer-driven entities that accompany Granjon in his live performances. Like the videos, Granjon’s recent performances are ‘presentations’ of inventions. A heightened tension builds up as Granjon preps his robots in front of the audience and explains the procedures he follows. Setbacks and contre-temps are incorporated into the act. In The Z Lab Presents (1999), Granjon sings with one of his creations in La Chanson du Toutou. Toutou is a robot dog who barks in time to the music, moving back and forth on a track. A video projection of its face is triggered each time the robot moves forward. The massive projected face of Toutou creates an important retrospective link with Granjon’s earlier video works- a fiction is generated and negated by the presence of the tiny toy dog. The projection also recalls the famous moment in The Wizard of Oz when the curtains are pulled back to expose the tiny wizard and the levers that are used to manipulate his gigantic projected face. This is a performance that explores and exposes the mythology of the inventor (and artist) in real time. In contrast to the sometimes frustrating ‘realism’ of Granjon’s performances stands the Z lab, a quasi-mythical structure that he posits as a kind of ‘corporate headquarters’ for enquiry into natural phenomenon and the production of animated objects. Working, as it does, with technological concepts that range from artificial intelligence to anti-gravitation and cybernetics, the Z lab mirrors and lampoons ‘serious and mysterious’ scientific research organisations and their potentially threatening research and development programmes. The Z lab is a playful bid for scientific authenticity. This playfulness is particularly evident when considering the occasionally monstrous and toy-like creations that are its chief out-put, and the tools that are used to make them. Because, like a double entendre, the Z lab as a centre of technological research is remarkable for its anachronisms. Unlike other artistic organisations that appropriate cutting edge tools of technology to create art(1), the matrix of the Z lab is the laughably out of date Acorn BBC microcomputer model B. A discarded technological item with the programming power of an average toaster(2), Granjon’s BBC micro is a recent relic that evokes the dizzying speed of technological innovation and its effect on human perceptions of time. It is also a domestic object. The BBC micro was part of the first wave of pioneering computers that entered people’s homes, marketed as a tool and educational instrument, complete with its own entertainment facilities in the form of computer games. Granjon’s appropriation and regeneration of the BBC micro can be seen as a form of resistance to the tyranny of the new. Given "life" by a technology that seems, when compared with more recent computers and toys, as simple as a ticking clock, Granjon’s Fluffy Tamagotchi (1998) is a toddler-sized robot that eats gum-drops and poos blue custard. A machine toy endowed with the needs of an infant and thrust into a fickle and competitive mass market, it is not surprising that the original tamagotchi toy (aka virtual pet) should become a totem of interest to Granjon. Dressed in a hand-made teddy bear suit, the Fluffy Tamagotchi issues programmed screams to indicate its various needs. Its crudeness and its components (a toddler’s wind-up television, VCR motors, run by BBC micro) all serve to underscore its nature as a nostalgic discard, and Granjon’s particular interest in the regeneration of earlier technologies. As a cultural phenomenon, the recent global tamagotchi craze reveals a complicated relationship between humans and machines. Granjon’s robot is a nostalgia of the near present and contrasts the rhythms of ‘natural life’ with the ‘life-span’ of machines. The effect is poignant. One is reminded that the tamagotchi craze is over: infant robots are abandoned in kitchen drawers or consigned to the scrapheap of time. As such, the piece serves as a witty reversal to human concerns that machines will one day replace the human race(3). Created from mass-produced items, Granjon’s robots are ‘hand-made’ and often possess human-like voices and biological functions. Within his use of digital technology and robotics, there is a concern in the unique identity of each object, as if to counter a culture that disposes of things too quickly and too easily. The works in this exhibition mark a shift in Granjon’s practice. The relationship between nature and machines is again taken up, but individual creatures are integrated within installations. In each piece, the artist has replicated a ‘natural’ situation. And again, the counterpoint between natural rhythm and machine rhythm is a motif. Robot-Rabbit unstoppably repeats its identity at a rate of one word per second but is set upon a plinth of real, slowly growing grass. A cybernetic forest complete with flora and fauna, Automated Forest presents an accelerated day and night cycle. A bench is provided for the audience to enjoy a ‘few relaxing moments’ while highly stylised and simplified robot birds emit computer generated bird songs made realistic enough through programmed random parameters. A more distanced perspective is offered in CCTV Soundscape. Using Granjon’s robotized video surveillance system, the audience can explore remotely by joystick a miniature model of a modern landscape void of any visual manifestations of life. Real sounds, industrial noises, birds, cowbells, are evinced in real time as the camera moves. The artificial landscape is thus haunted by ‘reality.’ With its scaffolding set over top, the model wittily recalls medieval illustrations of heaven and earth. The camera’s eye in the sky view, projected in the separate control room, reinforces Granjon’s appropriation of a tool used, perhaps insidiously, to monitor human activity. The pieces in this exhibition reflect Granjon’s fascination with time and change, and the wizardry involved in bringing inanimate objects to ‘life’. At the beginning of the last century, Ezra Pound said that ‘A natural philosopher would find this modern world full of enchantments, not only in the light in the electric bulb but the thought of the current hidden in air and in wire would give him a mindful of forms.’ An underlying effect of this exhibition is precisely this sense of enchantment: Granjon stresses the magical within the real while at the same time touching upon contemporary concerns and anxieties. In offering his own parallel environments and fantastical constructions, he may also be disarming some of the fantasies and fears that we project upon machines and their makers. In the field of electronic art, Granjon’s experiments, observations, and constructions are explorations of the relationship between the human and the technological at the turn of the 21st century. His work is a reminder that while the future is uncertain, the present lies in human hands. This essay is based on an original idea by Alison Green. 1. The ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany is probably the most famous of such high technology arts centres (www.zkm.de). 2. The Acorn BBC microcomputer Model B uses a Motorola 6502 processor running at 2mHz. It has 32 kilobytes of RAM and no hard drive. 3. Kevin Warwick, March of the Machines 4. Ezra Pound, Cavalcanti, in Literary Essays, p. 155.